Annoyance
by Igenlode Wordsmith
Summary: The dead won't leave Erik alone. But he truly can't understand why.


_A/N: Written for the WA One-Word Prompt Challenge and the Phantom's Haunting Halloween One-Shot Contest._

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Erik sees faces, sometimes, in the dark.

He sees many things in the shadowed passageways of his home, the domain he has claimed for his own, and not all of them are real. Or not in the ways that one would think. He understands that better than anyone, being himself an unreal thing: the Phantom of the Opera.

The neat simplicity of that conclusion pleases him, and he chuckles out loud, as he often does in the silence when he is alone. The echo is not pleasant, but he is accustomed to that.

And is not 'phantom', after all, as good a title as 'Erik'? The latter he chose for himself, long ago, in a country far from this; the other he has earned here by cleverness and guile through the gross superstitions of the ignorant. They bring out iron horseshoes and make the sign of the horns like peasants where the priest cannot see... and not one of them dreams that the voice that whispers when no-one is by —the shape that slips through locked doors, the ghastly face glimpsed for a moment in the dark— all that panic that reigns in the Opera House is the manifestation of one mortal man.

A man whose abilities surpass theirs even as his deformity exceeds their understanding. A man whom the world has rejected at sight for as long as he can remember, all the way from provincial France to distant Indochina on the far side of the globe — and who has learned in turn to harvest it at his will, and without remorse. The childhood name with which his parents had endowed him (foolish plebeian creatures, he tells himself, undiscriminating clods who had never deserved his loyalty) he has long since discarded behind him.

He is Erik now. He has chosen to be Erik. He has seen more death than any here have dreamed of, even on the Opera House stage with its weekly enactments of stabbings and suicides.

And sometimes he sees dead things that are not real.

Oh yes, the floating faces are dead, he knows that. He is, after all, something of an expert in the subject; another little chuckle escapes him. He knows how a man's jaw will drop and his eyes sink and grow dull like those of stale fish on the market slab. He knows what the dead look like after one day, after two, and after six weeks in the shallow earth when one comes back to uncover them. And if by any chance his memory should fail him in that last respect... why, he has only to subject himself to the spectacle of his own uncovered features in the mirror.

The sound that comes from within Erik's throat this time has nothing of laughter in it. And yet it is a joke, is it not —the richest of jokes— that a living man should carry the face of a withered corpse, while the dead who come to him should be as fresh to the sight as the day they met their end?

There were fewer such visitations before _she_ came. At least, he thinks it was so, although the long years since his return to France are dim now compared to the bright Orient of his youth. He had craved that dullness, for a time. Had planned and built street after street of square, shabby little houses with no more trickery than any other contractor, and only a cloth mask across his face that might have concealed the disfigurements of some war. But now, looking back, all those days of honest industry and solid bourgeois wealth are blurred together into a single smear of grey.

Had the dead come then so often to pester him with unseeing eyes, pointing and clutching with their silent screams? He thinks not. But he cannot be sure.

In all those years since at last he fled the Sultan's court, he thinks, all those years in which the last of his youth faded to stringy flesh and the aches of encroaching age, he remembers only three times when he has felt truly alive. The genius-stroke of inspiration by which the excavations for an opera house were used to create this refuge of his own. The time of the Communards, when death stalked the city with cruelties worthy of a Sultan or a Shah, and all monsters were at liberty to roam. And these past few months... when _she_ has been there to overset his world.

She thinks he is an angel, and how ironic is that? He, the greatest of conjurors, the prince of lies... and this is just one more little deception, and not even at any prompting of his own. She asked him in the ignorance of her trusting faith if he was an angel, and he had only to agree. For who but an angel — or Erik! — could speak from thin air in an empty room, or bemuse the soul with exquisite music as overwhelming as the hideous face of its creator?

She believes in him, which makes her as gullible as the rest. Thinks him a creature of celestial glory, no doubt. How she would scream if ever she saw Erik's true features behind her in the dark! She would be his, then, his forever, like all the others. A woman doesn't just walk away from Erik, oh no — not once she has seen him plain...

He should do it, Erik thinks coldly, calmly. A deserted hallway, a brief moan of terror, and it will all be over. And Erik will not need to feel these things that she makes him feel, these things he does not understand. But a shudder of revulsion betrays him at the very thought of that young neck and the jerk of the cord between his hands.

He has begun to want things he had long since forgotten. Since first he heard her voice it has come to him as if by revelation that he is tired and aging and alone, and that his secret life has lost the savour of ingenuity and become merely an outworn list of pranks in the dusk behind the walls. He has begun to envy others: the tedious, the ungifted, the boring and bourgeois who have no chambers of torture and cunning illusion within their homes, but who stroll on a Sunday openly under the trees with girls such as _her_ upon their arm.

No-one save Erik takes any interest in her. She is all but alone in the world, and no-one would care. So why can he not do what is so obvious to excise this disturbing influence and set the world back as it should be? Why does he... _need_ her so much, and what can it mean?

Dead faces cluster round him, demanding. Persian faces, oh, so many: young men, clear-skinned, fine-boned and proud, bearded advisors with wily eyes, prisoners brutalised and scarred, over-mighty courtiers... and women too. Discarded favourites of the little sultana, luckless beauties with thick dark brows; handmaidens who had stumbled, wives and daughters of the condemned, and others besides, men and women alike. Deaths Erik had not even seen, though the marks of his traps are upon them. The Shah had made great use of Erik, and those cunning devices had not ceased to function when the despot turned at length upon their creator.

Faces from Turkey, where the Sultan had likewise made use of Erik's skilled hands. Dead men from the Punjab, where he had learnt from the last of the hidden cult of Kali the art of the killing cord. From Indochina a boatload of river pirates, each with a drooping black slash of moustache to mirror the marks across his throat, and a single sickly drowned child. A pickpocket? A stowaway? Or merely a solitary fisher fallen victim to the trick of the reed? Erik does not remember. What is it to him, and why should he care?

All colours, all races, all creeds are alike to him. That nameless boy from the Mekong had meant no more and yet no less than the fine French bravo who all but murdered Erik during the Siege of Paris over a precious loaf of bread. Now they intrude upon his senses side by side, in some vain expectation he cannot fathom.

They are dead, and he is alive, and that is exactly how it ought to be. So why when he thinks of _her_ does he quail at the thought of her reproach? And if... if she were to join those others who met death through him, would this annoyance end? Or would it then be her image that he needs must brush away again and again, like a clinging cobweb across his path?

In the depths of his heart, he knows it would. And to Erik, who feels nothing and fears nothing, there come the first tremors of conscience with the first unsought knowledge of love in the dark.


End file.
